institutions when they returned home. They saw themselves as the guardians of the true Russian way of life which was being undermined by the Soviet regime.
In the 'Little Russias' of Berlin, Paris and New York the emigres created their own mythic versions of the 'good Russian life' before 1917. They returned to a past that never was - a past, in fact, that had never been as good, or as 'Russian', as that now recalled by the emigres. Nabokov described the first generation of exiles from Soviet Russia as 'hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilization, the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1916 (which even then, in the twenties and thirties, sounded like 1916-1900 bc)'.28 There were literary soirees in private rooms and hired halls, where faded actresses provided nostalgic echoes of the Moscow Arts Theatre and mediocre authors 'trudged through a fog of rhythmic prose'.29 There were midnight Easter masses in the Russian church; summer trips to Biarritz ('as before'); and weekend parties at Chekhovian houses in the south of France which recalled a long-gone era of the 'gentry idyll' in the Russian countryside. Russians who before the Revolution had assumed foreign ways, or had never gone to church, now, as exiles, clung to their native customs and Orthodox beliefs. There was a revival of the Russian faith abroad, with much talk among the emigres of how the Revolution had been brought about by European secular beliefs, and a level of religious observance which they had never shown before 1917. The exiles stuck to their native language as if to their personality. Nabokov, who had learned to read English before he could read Russian, became so afraid of losing his command of the Russian language when he was at Cambridge University in the early 1920s that he resolved to read ten pages of Dahl's Russian Dictionary every day.
This accentuation of their Russianness was reinforced by a mutual animosity between the exiles and their hosts. The French and the Germans, in particular, looked upon the Russians as barbaric parasites on their own war-torn economies; while the Russians, who were destitute but on the whole much better read than either the French or the Germans, thought themselves a cut above such 'petty bourgeois' types (according to Nabokov, the Russians of Berlin mixed only with the Jews). In a passage of Speak, Memory that still smacks of such
attitudes Nabokov claims that the only German in Berlin he ever got to know was a university student,
well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment… Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this) a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans - the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler's reign.30
The sheer volume of artistic talent in the emigre communities was bound to divide them from the societies in which they found themselves. 'The ghetto of emigration was actually an environment imbued with a greater concentration of culture and a deeper freedom of thought than we saw in this or that country around us,' Nabokov reminisced in an interview in 1966. 'Who would want to leave this inner freedom in order to enter the outer unfamiliar world?'31 There was, moreover, a political division between the mainly left-wing intellectuals of the West and those Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks. Berberova maintained that there was 'not one single writer of renown who would have been for us [the emigres]' - and it is hard to disagree. H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Stefan Zweig all declared their support for the Soviet regime; while others, such as Hemingway or the Bloomsbury set, were basically indifferent to what was going on inside the Soviet Union.
Isolated in this way, the emigres united around the symbols of Russian culture as the focus of their national identity. Culture was the one stable element they had in a world of chaos and destruction - the only thing that remained for them of the old Russia - and for all their political squabbles, the thing that gave the emigres a sense of common purpose was the preservation of their cultural heritage. The 'Little Russias' of the emigration were intellectual homelands. They were not defined by attachment to the soil or even to the history of the real Russia (there was no period of Russian history around which they could agree to unite: for the emigre community contained both monarchists and anti-monarchists, socialists and anti-socialists).
In these societies literature became the locus patriae, with the 'thick'
literary journal as its central institution. Combining literature with social commentary and politics, these journals organized their readers in societies of thought, as they had done in Russia before 1917. Every major centre of the emigration had its thick journals, and each journal was in turn associated with the literary clubs and cafes which represented the different shades of political opinion. The biggest-selling journal was published in Paris - Sovremenny zapiski (Contemporary Annals), a title which was meant as a reference to the two most prestigious liberal journals of the nineteenth century: Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland). Its stated mission was the preservation of Russia's cultural heritage. This meant keeping to the well-tried names that had been established before 1917 -writers such as Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Remizov and (the queen of literary Paris) Zinaida Gippius - which made it very hard for younger or more experimental writers such as Nabokov and Tsvetaeva. There was enough demand for the reassuring presence of the Russian classics to sustain a score of publishers.32
Pushkin became a sort of figurehead of Russia Abroad. His birthday was celebrated as a national holiday in the absence of any other historical event the emigres could agree to commemorate. There was much in Pushkin with which the emigres could identify: his liberal-conservative (Karamzinian) approach to Russian history; his cautious support of the monarchy as a bulwark against the anarchistic violence of the revolutionary mob; his uncompromising individualism and belief in artistic liberty; and his 'exile' from Russia (in his case, from Moscow and St Petersburg). It is perhaps no coincidence that the emigration spawned some of the most brilliant Pushkin scholars of the twentieth century - among them Nabokov, with his 4-volume annotated English translation of Eugene Onegin.33
Among the Parisian emigres Bunin was revered as the heir to this literary heritage, a living affirmation that the realist tradition of Turg-enev and Tolstoy continued on in the diaspora. As Bunin himself put it in a celebrated speech of 1924, it was 'The Mission of the Emigration' to act for the 'True Russia' by protecting this inheritance from the modernist corruptions of left-wing and Soviet art. The mantle of national leadership had been conferred on Bunin, as a writer, only after 1917. Before the Revolution he had not been placed by many in
the highest class: his prose style was heavy and conventional compared to the favoured writers of the avant-garde. But after 1917 there was a revolution in the artistic values of the emigres. They came to reject the literary avant-garde, which they associated with the revolutionaries, and, once they found themselves abroad, they took great comfort in the old-fashioned 'Russian virtues' of Bunin's prose. As one critic put it, Bunin's works were the 'repository of a covenant', a 'sacred link' between the emigration and the Russia that was lost. Even Gorky, in Berlin, would abandon everything and lock himself away to read the latest volume of Bunin's stories as soon as it arrived in the mail from Paris. As an heir to the realist tradition, Gorky thought of Bunin as the last great Russian writer in the broken line of Chekhov and Tolstoy.34 In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, the first Russian writer to be honoured in this way. Coming as it did at a time when Stalin was putting Soviet culture into chains, the award was perceived by the emigres as a recognition of the fact that the True Russia (as defined by culture) was abroad. Gippius, who was somewhat prone to hero-worship, called Bunin 'Russia's prime minister in exile'. Others hailed him as the 'Russian Moses' who would lead the exiles back to their promised land.35